What Dilma Can Do to Improve US-Brazil Relations

By Peter Hakim
O Estado de S.Paulo, January 12, 2011

Una versión de este articulo en español está disponible aquí. Este artigo está disponivel em português aqui.

Brandishing an 87 percent approval rating when he left office on January 1, President Lula da Silva clearly could not have done much wrong. And indeed, during his eight years in power, the Brazilian economy performed better than it had in more than a generation, hardly affected by the global financial crisis. Poverty and inequality dropped sharply. Brazil’s worldwide prestige and influence grew vertiginously.  The record was not perfect, however. Relations with the US—which remain centrally important for Brazil—started out on a high note, when then President-elect Lula met with President Bush in the Oval Office in 2002. But they have soured in recent years and are today deeply strained, with Lula and his advisors sharing the blame with US authorities in Washington. Obama’s scheduled visit to Brazil in March provides a promising opportunity for both governments to begin repairing the deteriorated relationship. 

It will not be easy. New President Dilma Rousseff knows that and so does her foreign minister Antonio Patriota, who served for nearly three years as Brazil’s envoy in Washington. They have already made a few modest gestures in the right direction. In a Washington Post interview last month (December), Dilma assigned high priority to establishing closer ties with the US, implicitly recognizing that all was not well between the two nations. And she slightly distanced herself from the Lula government by criticizing Brazil’s recent abstention from a UN vote to condemn Iran for stoning and other human rights abuses. At the same time, however, she has not suggested a dramatic alteration of Brazil’s relations with Iran, which deeply trouble Washington.

Iran is not the only point of contention between the US and Brazil. No matter how adroitly Dilma manages foreign policy, these two globally-minded nations will, for years to come, be colliding with one another on an array of issues. With policies and agendas that reflect their divergent interests, priorities, and approaches to international affairs, they will surely confront one another time and again in many different arenas. In regional affairs, Brazil deeply irritated the US last year when it aggressively opposed the US’s access to Colombian bases. Differences over Honduras are sustaining a divisive standoff in hemispheric relations. They have polar opposite views on how to deal with Cuba, and infrequently coincide on appropriate responses to Venezuela. Global matters are where the most intense conflicts have emerged, however. 

Washington is most exasperated by Brazil’s unwavering defense of Iran’s nuclear program. Many elements of the Brazil-Iran linkage trouble the US (including Brazil’s seeming indifference to Iran’s repression at home, its support of terrorist groups, and its unrelenting threats against Israel). The core issue dividing the two countries, however, is their respective assessments of whether or not Iran is on track to develop atomic weapons and what to do about it. Nothing else stands so flagrantly in the way of improved US-Brazil ties.

The US will be looking to the Dilma government, at a minimum, for some signs of skepticism about Iran’s insistent claims that its program is aimed only at civilian uses of nuclear power—for an indication that Brazil is willing to consider the accumulating evidence that Iran intends to build a bomb. The prospects of resetting US-Brazil relations are dim, if Brazil is unwilling to moderate its categorical defense of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The US might well have viewed last May’s Brazil-Turkey negotiations with Iran more positively, if it had not seen them mainly as another Brazilian effort to delay UN sanctions against Tehran.

Brazil’s own nuclear program may also become a contentious issue in US-Brazilian relations.  Few in Washington today are concerned about Brazil developing atomic weapons. But US officials are worried  that Brazilian actions are weakening global efforts stop the spread of nuclear arms—not only by defending Iran, but also by refusing to endorse recent amendments to the nonproliferation treaty (NPT) and open its nuclear facilities to more intrusive UN inspections.  Ideally, nuclear development should be an area of US-Brazilian cooperation. Washington’s three-year old agreement with India could serve as model for US technology transfer to Brazil, if the Dilma government were willing to be more supportive of nonproliferation initiatives.

And there are other promising areas for US-Brazilian collaboration. Global and bilateral trade policies, regional security matters, energy and climate change questions, and the governance of international organizations are some of them. In almost every area, however, it is uncertain whether the two continental nations will end up cooperating or clashing—or some measure of both.

Still, regardless of what they do together regarding these and other challenges, when it comes to Brazil, Washington will be intently focused on the issues surrounding nuclear proliferation. What matter most to the US is how Brazil manages its own nuclear development plans, and the positions and actions it takes at the UN and elsewhere regarding the NPT and the Iranian atomic program. That is what the Dilma government will have to keep that in mind, if it wants a closer relationship with the US.